Interactive read alouds are a great way to incorporate extra literacy practice into the school day while keeping students on track and engaged. Books like The Recess Queen are perfect for interactive read alouds as the beginning of the school year. Keep reading for some of my favorite The Recess Queen activities that will help your students practice comprehension skills in an engaging way!
Practicing Reading Comprehension with Read Alouds
Reading aloud to students is an important component of structured literacy. During read alouds, the teachers are doing all of the decoding work which frees students up to do all of the thinking work. Students are able to focus all of their attention on enjoying the story and comprehending the text.
Reading comprehension might not be top-of-mind when it comes to early literacy. However, we know that it’s an essential part of reading development, even when students are still learning letters and sounds!
Language comprehension is one of the essential strands of Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope. As you can see in this popular infographic, the Language Comprehension strand intertwines with other reading sub-skills as students learn to read. It’s important that we are working to develop all of these strands equally so students can become fluent and confident readers.
The Recess Queen Activities: Reading Comprehension Practice
The Recess Queen by Alexis O’Neill is a great read-aloud book for early elementary students. There are many different ways that you can incorporate comprehension practice into your lesson plans using engaging story.
In this story, a bully named Mean Jean reigns over recess at her school. No one dares to do anything on the playground without her say-so. That is until Katie Sue moves to town. Being the new kid in class, Katie Sue doesn’t know about the playground hierarchy and just plays her heart out. When Mean Jean confronts her, Katie Sue is unbothered and continues to play. In fact, she actually invites Mean Jean to play with her. Your students will be just as shocked by the sweet ending as the students in the story!
As you read this story together as a class, you’ll discover many opportunities for your students to practice comprehension strategies. Here are a few of my favorite The Recess Queen activities that go along with this read-aloud.
1. Predicting
First, you can pause your reading at the part of the story when Katie Sue goes out to the playground. Ask your students to make a prediction about what will happen next.
Students can use a reflection page to document their predictions. For young kindergarten students, this might be through illustration only. First graders might write a sentence to share their predictions. Either way, making predictions is a great way to get students thinking about the story. Here are a few examples from first grade:
“I think Mean Jean is going to be mean.”
“I think that Mean Jean will be mean to Katie Sue.”
“I think Katie Sue will not listen to Mean Jean.”
“She is going to feel scared.”
2. Inferring
As students experience the story of Mean Jean, they might wonder why she acts the way she does on the playground. They can use evidence from the story to make an inference about Mean Jean’s reasons for being so mean to her classmates.
You can take the opportunity to have some additional discussion with your students as they write and illustrate their inferences. When students can talk about what they read, they are more likely to understand what they read.
“I think that Mean Jean was mean because she wanted her way.”
“I think that Jean wanted to get her way.”
“I think Mean Jean is mean because she wants her way.”
3. Retelling
Which leads to the next comprehension skill that you can practice with this read-aloud activity: Retelling. We know that the person doing the most talking is the person who is doing the most learning. Get your students to talk about the story with retelling activities!
Retelling cards can provide a great visual support for young students as they try to remember key events from the story. Students can even cut out and arrange the retelling cards for sequencing practice! Retelling and sequencing are both very important skills for speaking and writing, so it’s always helpful to incorporate this skill practice whenever possible.
4. Character Analysis
Readers with strong comprehension skills are able to recognize the changes that occur in characters over the course of a story. The Recess Queen is the perfect story to illustrate character development! Here are two anchor charts that I did with my students after reading this story:
For this first anchor chart, the students came up with phrases that described Katie Sue, then they had to provide evidence from the text to support their answers. The blue notes are the descriptive phrases and the yellow notes contain the text evidence. This is also a great time to practice vocabulary words by finding words that describe the size of Katie Sue. Those are recorded in green on the anchor chart.
For Mean Jean, the kids used phrases to describe her at the beginning of the story and then at the end of the story. Similar to the first anchor chart, they had to provide evidence from the text to support their answers.
After analyzing the characters together as a class, students can complete their own reflection by writing about how Mean Jean developed over the course of the story.
5. Opinion Writing
Finally, you can give students a chance to put all of their comprehension practice to good use with an opinion writing activity. Students can write about their favorite part of the story, using evidence from the story to support their opinions.
They can also illustrate their opinion writing. It’s always so fun to see which parts of the story were the students’ favorites.
Printable Activities for The Recess Queen
You can find all of the activities mentioned in this post (and many more!) in one easy-to-prep printable resource. This set of activities includes everything you need to enhance your read-alouds with additional literacy skill practice.
The activities for The Recess Queen come in a set of Back to School Read Aloud Activities includes printables for six different books that are perfect for the beginning of the school year. You’ll also find scripted, research-based lesson plans that take the guesswork out of planning your interactive read alouds!
Just head over to my TPT store to take a look at all of the read-aloud lessons included in this set of printable resources.
Save These Recess Queen Activities
Be sure to save this post so you can come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite Pinterest board of teaching ideas. You’ll be able to quickly find these activity ideas when you’re ready to read The Recess Queen with your students.
Free Directed Drawing Download
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Your students will love being able to draw the characters from the book!
